u/xTheKingOfClubs

I’ve never in my life made $100,000 in a year at any point in my professional career. I live in a high cost of living area where my one-bedroom apartment runs me around $2,000 monthly, I pay for my car and the fees associated with that, internet, utilities, parking, phone bill, student loans, groceries, and I try to put money into savings to eventually support my disabled brother.

Even with these expenses, I still contribute to my 401(k) to get the highest match from my employer, I eat out around once a week, I hit the bars with my friends when I feel like it, I buy myself something I want just because every once in a while, and I really never worry about money in a “holy shit I’m barely surviving” way.

For those reasons, I find it very eye-rolling when I see countless people online crying into their cell phone camera about how they make $100,000/year and are “barely surviving” or how it’s the “bare minimum.” The same goes for all these people in internet comment sections talking about how making less than $100,000 annually is some sort of human rights violation and how capitalism is evil for that and whatever.

It really begs the question, what the fuck are you guys spending your money on? If I had an extra $15k-$20k tacked onto my salary I would be feeling like fucking Jeff Bezos. What sort of spending habits could you possibly have, or what string of decisions could you possibly make to have a six-figure salary and be “barely surviving?” And this is coming from someone who supports a severely disabled family member who won’t ever be able to even live alone, so don’t lecture me about how people have “different circumstances” or whatever. Trust me, I know.

When people say this, all I can think is that it’s a major skill issue and that they’re leaving out MAJOR details and how badly I wish I could see their monthly expenses.

Like, did you fall into a pyramid scheme or buy a crazy house you can’t afford or move into a New York City penthouse that costs you your entire paycheck? I have family members that make even less than I do that live in NYC and they’re doing fine. Did you all have a ton of kids you can’t afford? Like, genuinely what is it?

I can’t stand how far society has bent over backward the past five-ish years to appease people who misunderstand things on purpose to try and start arguments.

We, the people with IQs above 50, who are able to understand context clues and generalities, need to stop allowing these people to dominate public discourse.

If someone says “everyone should exercise daily” and someone responds with “OMG WELL WHAT IF SOMEONE WAS IN A HELICOPTER ACCIDENT AND LOST ALL THEIR LIMBS AND IS IN A COMA AND NEEDS TO BE ON A VENTILATOR AT ALL TIMES TO STAY ALIVE…”

The correct response to that is “shut up, you’re a moron and you’re not intelligent enough to partake in this conversation.”

It’s not “oh wow, you’re so right! Let me amend this statement to include comatose helicopter crash victims.”

The more we appease this nonsense at large, the worse it gets. We need to just start openly, aggressively mocking people who act like this. The worst part is that they think they’re making some profound observation, when all they’re communicating is that they’re so dense they can’t understand a simple generality.

I work for a pretty “woke” company (omg, he said ‘woke,’ I can’t believe it, I’m not reading the rest of this) and this guy gave an hour-long speech at this conference about how Andrew Tate is ruining society and whatever to the thunderous applause of everyone there. I also see Andrew Tate referenced all the time on this platform and others as this scary person who’s influencing young men to be horrible and sexist and treat women poorly and XYZ and whatever.

I have to say, as a mid-twenties man, this makes me laugh. The idea that there are these huge portions of men in their teens and twenties who are looking to Andrew Tate for any sort of legitimate advice or worldview is just ridiculous and honestly laughable.

He’s literally just a lolcow who gets clicks from intentionally saying the most controversial shit imaginable and farming the reaction from social media pearl clutchers. The fact that we have people who are allegedly respectable speakers and journalists framing him as some sort of figurehead for any sort of movement, political or otherwise, is quite hilarious. He’s just an internet troll and weirdo criminal.

It would be like if I got up on a stage or started lecturing people online about how YouTube videos made by Trisha Paytas are causing the downfall of society. She’s a meme.

Andrew Tate, much like Amber Lynn Reid and other controversial social media figures, is just a meme and a lolcow who exists to get clicks from controversy. No one actually takes him seriously, including himself. He’s a Jake Paul type who’s putting on a persona. All this uppity discourse and think pieces about him are so ridiculous.

The only time I EVER see Andrew Tate discussed or mentioned in any capacity is when left-wingers pearl clutch and hyperventilate over him. It’s genuinely been years since I’ve seen him referenced in any other context.

Whenever someone online refers to the United States of America as “America” for shorthand, without a doubt there’s people who show up and say “AXESHULLY, AMERICA is NOT a COUNTRY. It isn’t ALWAYS about YOU. AMERICA is a CONTINENT. Not EVERYTHING is about the UNITED STATES.”

Which is quite hilarious, because this is the same population of people who had a complete conniption and were hyperventilating at the prospect of the gulf being renamed to the “Gulf of America.”

If you are going to condescendingly scold people and insist that “America” refers to a continent and not a country, then I better not hear you complaining about “Gulf of America,” because by your own logic, it makes perfect sense and has nothing to do with centering the United States specifically.

“BUT OP, HOW DO YOU KNOW IT’S THE SAME PEOPLE???” Because I’m referring to the self-righteous, smug people who have a problem with everything and we all know there’s significant overlap here.

Either “America” is shorthand for the United States of America and we can complain about the name change, or it refers to a continent and the name change makes perfect sense for the gulf. You can’t have it both ways.

Whenever someone on the internet criticizes a no-no group or person for any reason, no matter how small, there’s a million people that immediately respond very angrily with something to the effect of “TRY HAVING EMPATHY!” “SO YOU HAVE NO EMPATHY???” “YOU’VE HEARD OF EMPATHY, RIGHT???”

I don’t know when or how so many people came to the conclusion that the only way to be empathetic to other people is to excuse 100% of their actions and decide basic rules don’t apply to them, but that’s just not a rational line of thought.

Like, just for one example, I can feel empathetic toward the homeless woman who assaulted me outside my apartment building because she thought I stole her drugs (true story), but that doesn’t mean I have to pretend there’s no problem with her living in the apartment stairwell, smoking crack and assaulting random people when they enter or exit the building because she misplaced her stash and can’t think straight. But if I were to express that this were a problem in any meaningful way online, these people would jump down my throat before I could even get one sentence out for “not having empathy,” which doesn’t make any sense. Acknowledging the existence of a problem is completely unrelated to my emotional response to her situation.

The only way you can “have empathy” in their eyes is to basically throw up your hands and say “well, I have empathy! So I guess I’ll just allow this to happen, abandon all my basic logic and reasoning abilities and not dare acknowledge that this obvious problem is an issue!”

This collection of people seems to think that anyone they perceive as “disadvantaged” in any capacity whatsoever should be able to do whatever they want all the time, and if you have a problem with that, you’re an emotionally broken person and need to be shamed.

“I have empathy for someone” does not equal “I have a duty make excuses for their unacceptable or illegal behavior until the end of time with no limits.”

This practice has nothing to do with what the word “empathy” even means.

You cannot simultaneously insist that “white people have no culture” and then catalogue an entire suite of ideas, habits, and institutions as “whiteness” in action. The latter claim defines a culture.

If the Smithsonian’s “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness” report can list traits like rugged individualism, the nuclear family with a breadwinner husband, objective/rational/linear thinking, “work before play,” emphasis on the scientific method, and future-time orientation as markers of “whiteness,” then it, and anyone who buys into the discussion of “whiteness” in this manner, has conceded the existence of a recognizable cultural pattern.

You don’t get to attribute specific civilizational outputs (or problems) to “whiteness” while denying that any shared habits, ideas or values exist. That is self-refuting.

Criticizing “whiteness” as a bundle of traits is, by definition, an engagement with white/European-derived culture.

We hear the word “accountability” thrown around incessantly in today’s world, but the way progressives apply the concept of accountability is so strange and backward to me that it’s one of my biggest gripes with the ideology as a whole.

It’s almost like the more directly responsible you are for something happening to you, the less likely progressives are to say it’s your fault. It’s a complete inversion of responsibility based on what you would expect.

You’re morbidly obese because you choose to put an excess amount of calories in your body every day? You’re not responsible and it’s not your fault — it’s society’s fault for not giving you XYZ and the people shaming you are the real problem.

You chose to take out exorbitant loans to attend an out-of-state university and live in a high cost of living area to get a degree you knew would have low return on investment? You’re not responsible and it’s not your fault — it’s society’s fault because it “should be free.” (I’m not getting into the discussion of whether university should be taxpayer-funded, this is about people who do this knowing it’s not free.)

You’ve been arrested and jailed 20 times because you can’t stop breaking the law? It’s not your fault, you’re just being “over-policed” and the people arresting you are the problem.

You chose to have a kid with someone you knew was a loser, who has multiple other kids by multiple other people and a history of being a horrible partner and co-parent? It’s not your fault, you got “manipulated.”

Compared to:

Someone with a skin complexion similar to you did something bad centuries before you were born? Yeah, that is your fault, actually. And we need you to take accountability for that. It’s only fair. What do you mean you’re confused? You’re so fragile.

You’re the same sex as someone who did something bad? Take accountability for your role in toxicity. Take accountability and end toxic masculinity.

You said a slur while singing a rap song on video when you were 14 and had no idea what it meant? There’s no excuse. Take accountability for the harm you caused.

At the end of the day, they’ll hold you accountable for what someone who sort of looks like you did hundreds of years before you were born, but will refuse to hold someone else accountable for what they chose to do this afternoon. I don’t know how any self-respecting person could subscribe to this line of thinking.

It feels like every single year there’s some situation with some professional sports player or team and how someone objects to wearing some rainbow arm band or a rainbow pin on their hat or jersey or whatever.

It happened with the Philadelphia Flyers and the San Jose Sharks a couple years ago, it happened with the Tampa Bay Rays in like 2022, it‘s happened with the Premier League in the UK and other soccer/football clubs around Europe, it’s happening right now with the San Francisco Giants, the list goes on.

Right now we have people in San Francisco legitimately PROTESTING with posters outside the ballpark and several major media outlets are running numerous stories over the fact that four pitchers on the team wrote a Bible verse on their hat and one player didn’t want to wear the rainbow hat. The team manager is being inundated with questions about why this happened and what can be done and XYZ and whatever else. These protesters being interviewed are talking like they survived a traumatic event and they’re declaring they can’t be a fan of the team anymore.

Like… are we serious? I swear this is the kind of shit that makes me humiliated to be rainbow. If you have the time to make a poster board and stand outside the stadium because four baseball pitchers you’ve never met don’t wish to celebrate you, you are incredibly soft and need to get a grip. Being rainbow is hard enough, do we really need to go so far out of our way to be this annoying and prove to them that we’re everything they think we are?

There are how many professional sports players out there, again? And how many hundreds of them participate in the celebration of us? But we have to make it a literal national news story when someone declines? We’re really that soft? When there’s this many professional sports players, it’s practically guaranteed someone will say no.

Also — they’re allowed to not want to wear rainbow merch if they don’t want to, it’s a free country. If they have religious beliefs or whatever other reason, it’s none of our business. People are acting like they ripped a rainbow flag apart and set it on fire on the field or something.

This is why I hate rainbow month. Stuff like this happens essentially every year and the way rainbow people fall apart over it makes me so embarrassed.

Or something like “I did a desk job and it’s just NOT FOR ME.”

Like, yeah, it’s sitting under fluorescent lights for eight hours a day or more and doing work on a computer. It’s not “for” anyone. Nobody evolved to be a compliance or risk analyst at a financial services firm, or whatever.

People usually say this kind of thing with this attitude that they’re “above it” in some capacity and are looking down on people who do it because they’re doing the “expected thing.”

I’m usually the last person under the sun to throw around the word “privileged,” but I do feel like it applies here. Like… you “could never work a desk job?” Yes, actually, you could. If you were in a situation where it was your only option, you would. You never hear someone in a legitimate financial emergency say this kind of thing.

I’m not saying working a white collar desk job is someone’s only option. My boyfriend is a nurse and I know how valuable that is to society and how difficult it is. I also understand and appreciate the importance of blue collar professions.

I guess what bothers me is that most people I’ve met who say this turn up their nose at desk jobs, only to go be unemployed or severely underemployed and are supported by their parents or partners who DO work a desk job, but for some reason they’re too good for it.

It’s frankly exhausting that any time someone makes a blanket statement online, the progressive, chronically online Redditor types immediately use disabled people as shields to try and excuse their loser or antisocial behavior. It happens literally all the time.

“You shouldn’t be able to bring your pet dog into a grocery store or into a movie theater just because you feel like it.”
“UM, YOU KNOW SERVICE DOGS EXIST, RIGHT? SO SOMEONE CAN’T BRING THEIR SEEING-EYE DOG IN?”

Well, YOUR dog is not a service dog. So why are you using the fact that disabled people exist as a shield to try and excuse your selfish and antisocial behavior?

“Everyone should try to exercise every day.”
“UM, YOU KNOW DISABLED PEOPLE EXIST, RIGHT? SOME PEOPLE CAN’T WALK MORE THAN FIVE STEPS. SOME PEOPLE CAN’T WALK AT ALL.”

Well, YOU can exercise and are able-bodied. Why are you using the fact that disabled people exist as a shield to excuse yourself from doing any physical activity?

“Everyone should work a full-time job.”
“WOW, YOU KNOW DISABLED PEOPLE EXIST, RIGHT? DISABLED PEOPLE CAN’T JUST WORK ANY JOB. DISABLED PEOPLE HAVE A HARD TIME WORKING FULL-TIME.”

Well, YOU can work a full-time job. Why are you using the fact that disabled people exist to justify being perpetually unemployed and living off other people?

I help support my (actually) disabled brother, so seeing this shit drives me insane. Disabled people are actual people and are not shields for you to hold up as a means to defend your loser behavior.

It’s also just an obvious form of playing dumb. The people who say this nonsense know that nobody is walking around saying “Hell yeah! Fuck seeing-eye dogs!!! People who are wheelchair-bound should run 10 miles a day, no exceptions!!!!! Disabled people should have to work director-level corporate positions for 60 hours a week!!!!”

It’s just strawmanning they use to justify being a loser.

In addition to being stupid, land acknowledgements make me laugh because they’re so tone deaf and have the opposite of the intended effect.

Unless you’re planning to give the land back, starting a speech with a “land acknowledgment” makes you sound like you’re just dunking on people who are already dead.

“Hey! Before we get started I just want to acknowledge that those native people who lived here once got, like, totally destroyed in battle and lost everything. Are we giving the land back? Oh, lol, definitely not, we’re definitely keeping it and going to continue using it. We just want to remind everyone they got, like, totally annihilated and couldn’t defend their territory. I’m a good person for saying this, by the way!”

It would be like if you watched me steal your car and then I called you later and said “hey, I stole your car. I’m not giving it back or anything, but I’m reminding you I stole your car. Sucks to be you. LOL. I’m a good person for reminding you.”

Unless someone is deliberately going out of their way in a very specific manner in a blatant attempt to disrespect you, I quite literally could not care even slightly less.

This genuinely has to be some of the lowest IQ nonsense imaginable. Screaming at someone for wearing braids in their hair, or spending your time partaking in discussions about whether it’s “ethical” for someone to wear a certain outfit or piece of jewelry has to be the greatest waste of time I could ever fathom. And, yes, I come from a culture that gets “appropriated” quite regularly so please spare me the lecture about how it’s “history” or whatever you have prepared.

What really gets me is the heated arguments about which “culture” some random thing actually comes from.

“Erm, no! Braids actually come from sub-Saharan Africa!”
“Um, no, it’s actually Nordic culture!”

It’s a goddamn knot in your hair. Put it there or don’t. The sun will come up tomorrow. I swear, I’m dumber having watched these debates. It’s also just so, so unbelievably immature. You don’t own a hairstyle/piece of jewelry/body modification or literally anything, and thinking you have license to it for all of humanity until the end of time is beyond ridiculous and narcissistic. I could make a list of the top one billion things wrong with this world and “cultural appropriation” would not come even close to making it.

Also, let’s just be honest with each other, nobody sending death threats to a girl who lives over a thousand miles away from them due to her Chinese-inspired prom dress (true story) is doing so because they’re genuinely that distraught about “cultural appropriation.” They’re doing it because they’re nasty and addicted to scolding people on the internet because it gives them a dopamine hit, and when they get license to completely annihilate someone from the mob, they can’t help themselves.

I swear, 20 years ago, having a public meltdown about a stranger you’re never met wearing an article of clothing, a piece of jewelry or styling their hair in a specific way would get you involuntarily committed to a psych ward, and rightfully so. I just genuinely cannot take any grievances over this topic even remotely seriously.

Flying cars, they said.

Especially as it relates to politics, our opinions on political figures and many pressing political issues — the information we receive on them and the narratives we’re surrounded by are so overwhelmingly full of bias and are so carefully curated that our opinions on them basically mean nothing.

The political figure you hate most, you’d probably love them if the media you consumed wanted you to like them and their ideas. The political figure you love the most could easily be your most hated if the media you consumed wanted you to hate them and their ideas.

For most political causes you feel most strongly about — if the media you consumed wanted you to feel the opposite about the issue, you likely would.

The propaganda we’re inundated with as a society from every angle is so overwhelming and so selectively concocted to influence you in a specific way, that it’s nearly impossible to form objective opinions about most controversial topics because receiving any objective information is essentially impossible. Redditors in the comments will insist they are immune to this, which, in itself, is hubris.

I was in the middle of college when the pandemic hit and during its height. I lost almost a full year of my in-person university experience. I was supposed to go on a study abroad that was cancelled and didn’t even get to move out of my apartment and say bye to my roommates because we had to distance during our move out and show up on separate days to get our stuff. So please spare me the lectures about how I “just don’t get it” or how it’s “different for everyone.”

That said, if you’re one of these people walking around saying that you “lost your twenties” or “lost your teenage years” or “lost my best years to COVID,” you’re probably an unbearably dramatic and irritating basket case of a person who is insufferable to be around and desperate to look like a victim.

If you’ve let a period of stay-at-home orders and masking that lasted approximately a year and a half literally define an entire decade of your life, or any significant portion of it, you are the problem. The people I’ve found saying this are conveniently the ones who were a complete dramatic and emotional mess before the pandemic hit. I’ve never seen anyone who is a well-adjusted and regulated person walk around falling apart over COVID “robbing me of my twenties” or anything similar. This seems to be a common line almost exclusively among hysterical internet people who fall apart over everything. What I also find funny is that this type of person is the most chronically online, so lockdowns probably did not impact their typical routine much at all.

Since I know how this platform works and I need to spend a significant amount of time explaining every possible caveat at length, I’ll make exception for if you lost someone very close to you during COVID and had to readjust to life without them in your grief. That’s a different story, so don’t try to bean soup theory me over this post or I’ll ignore you.

You did not “lose your twenties” or “lose the best years of your life” to COVID, and if you did, it’s your own fault.

I’m about halfway through this book currently, and I’m considering a DNF just due to the secondhand embarrassment. Before I get into what I don’t like, let me say that I’m a minority myself and lived in Texas for many years, so I’m not interested in being on the receiving end of a lecture about how I “just don’t understand” or how it “just isn’t for you” or XYZ.

The biggest — and by far most distracting — issue is that the author is seemingly trying to tell an engaging thriller story, but you can tell half his brain is obsessed with random social justice topics that he forces into the book that serve literally no purpose other than to remind us that white people are very bad, the United States is very bad, Donald Trump is very bad… and please please please do not forget that white people are VERY bad. I just want to tell the author directly “we get it, you don’t like white people. Please tell the story now.”

The repeated instances of “racism” in this book are frankly extremely cartoonish and ridiculous. I can suspend my disbelief when reading a novel to a certain extent, but this is just insane. At the very beginning of the book the main character is looking up how to make a suppressor for a gun and the author reminds us like three times that the only place he can find information on this is on “white supremacist Internet forums” and he literally gives up trying to make one because all he’s seeing online is about how “minorities are taking over.”

Another part that got me is when the main character is talking about getting a job and says that it’s impossible to get a job if you have a Hispanic-sounding last name… in Texas. Where there are literally more Hispanic people than white people… just… LOL. This part literally prompted me to stop reading and Google if the author had any ties to Texas whatsoever because this claim is just so absurd.

The diner scene is also just so incredibly, incredibly cringe. There seems to be this running theme where the author inserts all these white people into the story out of nowhere who are stunned and surprised to see Hispanic people in Texas and are intent to insult them for no reason. He even describes them as “wearing John Deere hats” and has them literally say “go back to your country!” I was wondering if Jussie Smollett was the ghost writer for this passage. Immediately following this cartoonish scene, he reflects back on a photo of his wife and tells us that right after it was taken a group of white men started harassing her for being brown. Shocking and original.

The whole part with the diner literally read like an obviously-fake Reddit story. I could totally see it on the front page with 20k upvotes. “Me and my friends totally OWN some RACISTS at the local diner! Even knocked their teeth out!! Remember to always punch a Nazi!!!”

This doesn’t even cover the rest of the countless one-off comments that incessantly try to put down white people or the United States for no discernible reason. It does nothing for the plot whatsoever. It literally just seems like the author is trying to write the book but half his brain is seething over white people and this is his strange mechanism for release.

This book is also a quintessential example of a critique I saw on modern literature just recently. I was reading an essay online of a woman explaining that all books nowadays have these ties to “racism” or other fashionable social issues in an attempt to give the novel “mock gravity.” That term “mock gravity” keeps popping into my head as I read this novel. The author seems so desperate to make this book some sort of social commentary that he’s completely jumped the shark, abandoned any sort of legitimate plot, and fallen into this rhythm of introducing over-the-top cruel white people into the story to remind us white people are very bad, and this is supposed to be profound somehow?

I know Redditors eat up this kind of social justice commentary, but this book feels like a total bait-and-switch so far. Does this pick up in the second half? Or is it DNF-worthy?

We’re talking about a woman who lost her husband in the most graphic, public and disturbing way imaginable barely six months ago, and who now has to raise her small children by herself for the rest of their lives.

And what has the overwhelming internet reaction been? To relentlessly mock, ridicule and bully her for essentially no reason. Was the fact that she had to bury her 31-year-old husband not enough for you guys? Genuinely, what do you want from her? When is it enough?

The fact that so many people are comfortable constantly dehumanizing her and have absolutely zero empathy for her whatsoever is so strange and, frightening, actually. I cannot for the life of me understand what this woman did that is so unforgivable and so extreme that she deserves this treatment, other than the fact that she is apparently not as enthusiastic about progressive politics as the internet demands she be.

I was on a CNN social media page and there was a video of her being escorted out of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner crying, which is quite understandable given her recent history. I’m not exaggerating when I say I easily scrolled through 500 comments on the video and quite literally every single one was making fun of her for crying. Every single one. The ironic and, frankly depressing, part is that if she walked out with no reaction everyone would ridicule her and say she was in on the “staged assassination attempt.” It’s beyond ridiculous.

There seems to be this left-wing mass hysteria surrounding this woman that no one had ever even heard of less than a year ago, where everything she does at all times needs to be mocked into oblivion and all bets are completely off for reasons that have not been explained. It’s extremely strange.

If someone could describe what exactly this woman did to deserve this treatment, it would be extremely enlightening. I strongly believe people in the near future will look back on the treatment of her as a mass psychosis event.

I’m a non-straight atheist so trust me when I say we are not aligned on much at face value, but the treatment of her is so out of bounds and so ridiculous I’m just wondering what on Earth I’m missing. And, in light of it all, she’s handled it with more grace than anyone ridiculing her could even dream of.

Specifically, what does she have to do for people to stop? I’m confident Reddit will have no legitimate answer other than “Republicans are bad.”

EDIT: Less than 20 minutes since I’ve posted this and I’m somehow even more surprised and disappointed in the responses than I expected I would be. Which is saying a lot.